Cradlecrown v1.8: gates, order queues and repairs
Gates that keep the enemy out, Shift-queued orders, orders from the minimap, building repairs, attack alerts, changes to how the maps look, and a new summary on the result screen.
Before this release I played through the game from start to finish and took notes. Most of them came down to the same thing: forest ambushes, range from high ground, counters and walls were all in the game, but they were hard to notice during a match. Most of v1.8 deals with that. I also fixed something that was plainly broken: gates.
Gates
When you closed your wall with a gate, enemy soldiers could still walk through it. Pathfinding treated a gate as open for everyone. Now only your own and your allies’ troops can pass. When your soldiers come close, the gate’s grille rises, and it drops again once they’re through.
Fixing this exposed another problem: soldiers sent to attack a walled town couldn’t find a path and just waited outside the gate. Now soldiers with an attack order go for the first wall or gate in their way and continue to their target once it falls. Units on attack-move walk past walls that aren’t blocking them instead of stopping to hit them.
Repairs
Select a villager and right-click a damaged building to repair it. Farms, mines and lumber camps are the exception; right-clicking them still puts the villager to work.
Repairs cost resources. Bringing a building from nothing back to full health costs 40% of its build price, and the repair stops when you run out. It runs at a third of the building speed, and if the building was hit in the last three seconds, that drops to a third again. So you can patch a wall between attacks, but you can’t hold off an ongoing siege with villagers. Bots also repair their castle and towers once an attack eases.
Orders
Right-click with Shift held and the order is added behind the unit’s current one. A unit can hold up to 12 queued orders: moves, attack-moves and attacks on a target. Groups keep their formation on each leg. Selected units show their queued route as a dashed line on the ground.
Right-clicking the minimap sends the selected units there. With attack-move armed, a left click on the minimap does the same.
Attack alerts
If your castle, villagers or buildings were attacked while the camera was somewhere else, nothing told you. Now an alert appears under the resource bar, a red ring shows up on the minimap and a horn plays. If several places are hit at once, the castle comes first, then villagers and economy buildings. The Home key moves the camera to the last alert.
Selection panel and civilization cards
When you select a soldier, the panel shows what it’s strong and weak against. I show this with unit portraits instead of text. A green up arrow means an advantage, a red down arrow a disadvantage, and more arrows mean a bigger difference. Select a spearman, for example, and the cavalry portrait has three green arrows next to it, because spearmen deal 3.6 times damage to cavalry.
Terrain effects show above the selected soldier: a leaf when it’s hidden in a forest, a crossed-out leaf when an enemy is close enough to see it, +1 when a hill or wall gives it range, and a water mark in a ford.
I removed the percentage rows from the civilization choice you get when advancing an age. Effects are now shown as symbols with arrows: wheat for farm yield, logs for wood, a coin for gold, an hourglass for training time. A crown marks the lasting legacy and crossed swords the bonus your army gets the moment you choose. The numbers are in the tooltips and in the Details section at the bottom of each card. The single-player civilization select works the same way.
Opening guide
After the lumber camp, the guide suggested building the landmark. The landmark needs 80 stone, you start with none, and the guide never mentioned a stone mine, so anyone following it got stuck at that step. Now the guide points to a stone mine first, a gold mine if needed, and shows what’s missing, for example “Missing: 70 stone”.
Maps
Where villagers and soldiers walk often, the grass wears down into dirt paths. A trodden area forms around buildings. Paths that aren’t used grow back within a few minutes. This is visual only; paths don’t change speed.
Forests used to have one tree in the middle of every tile, with stepped edges. Now the trees inside a forest are taller and less regular, they get smaller towards the edge, and the thinnest edges turn into bushes. Hills are shaded too: northwest slopes are lit and southeast slopes are in shadow. The shaded area matches the area where the hill’s range bonus applies.
A short light effect plays around your castle and landmark when you reach a new age.
Unit animations
Units walked almost identically. Each type now has its own walk. Heavy infantry move in short, heavy steps and sway from side to side. Spearmen stand upright and lift their knees high. Archers take quicker steps. Villagers lean forward and shorten their steps when carrying a load.
Strikes depend on the weapon. Spearmen pull the spear back and thrust it straight, swordsmen swing in a wide arc, villagers bring their tool down from above. Attack timing and damage are unchanged.
To make the difference visible on the field, I spread out the walking speeds a little: heavy infantry went from 1.9 to 1.72, spearmen from 1.72 to 1.84, and archers from 2.05 to 2.16.
End of the match
The result screen now has a short summary under the numbers: a chart of your army and villager counts over time, with the key moments marked on it. Your first loss, big losses in a short time, the first attack on your castle, your landmark, each new age. If you lost, it gives one suggestion based on that match, such as how many minutes your villagers spent idle in total, or how many resources you had left unspent at the end.
Balance
In bot matches, one side would build up thousands of food and wood while its gold stayed near zero. Once the bot gave a villager a job, it never moved them to another one. It also never used the third gold deposit near its castle, because it hadn’t scouted it. Now it moves villagers from a resource it has too much of to one it’s short on, and it knows about the deposits near its base. Bot matches I ran on four maps used to last between 26 and 45 minutes; now they end around minute 20.
The reward for killing a unit was calculated from an old price table, so killing a spearman gave more gold than a spearman cost. Now you get a fifth of the dead unit’s actual price, in the same resources.
Other changes
- In the Treasury, supporter rows were cut off on 1280×720 screens. That’s fixed. Where the Treasury’s money goes is now at the top, and each tier lists what’s added to your account now separately from what comes with the Steam launch.
- I removed the descriptions under Single Player and Multiplayer in the main menu.
- A selected wall, gate or tower shows how many soldiers are stationed on it.
I deleted the Viking family, the berserker, the longhouse and the Odin shrine. They were left over from early versions, and no civilization could reach them, so they never appeared in matches.
This release changed the online match version. If you’ve had the game open in a tab, refresh it once before joining an online match.
The game is at cradlecrown.com. Send bugs or suggestions through r/cradlecrown or to [email protected].